Flash

7 Great Flash Tutorials

You may be familiar with Flash and its various uses, but do you have experience in actually using it to create projects of your own? If not, you may be wondering where to start. After all, there are loads of tutorials on the net that cover the subject. Here is a list of some of the top Flash tutorials to help you jump into its exciting possibilities.

Are you looking to build a flash website, but want to do so using a single tutorial that shows you all the necessary steps? Look no more, as this tutorial covers it all. Since you are creating a website and not a single effect, expect to spend a good amount of time here. Meant for those on the intermediate level, the tutorial is split into six main sections: layout creation, adding content, creating menu buttons, making the menu and section with ActionScript, scrolling the buttons and content with ActionScript, and creating the preloader.

There are plenty of pictures included to help you visualize each step so you don't get lost along the way. Once you are finished, you will have decent experience in creating a sample Flash website that you can tweak for your personal projects.

If you have a collection of photos that you want to display in an appealing format, this tutorial will help you do so with Flash. The goal of the tutorial is to build a 3D spherical photos gallery in Flash CS4. It allows you to take a large collection of photos that you would normally put in a gallery, and instead inject them into a globe or sphere shape. You can dictate the direction and speed of the sphere's rotation by simply clicking anywhere on it with your mouse. To get a closer look at each thumbnail, simply double-click on it.

While the gallery you learn to create is impressive within itself, the ease in which it can be created is the most appealing aspect of this tutorial. Thanks to AS3 3D methods in Flash, you don't need to call on more advanced tools such as Papervision3d to get the job done. Rotational methods and depth-sort are just a couple of the techniques used to create the final product. This is a solid tutorial that can be integrated into various sites that rely heavily on imagery.

This tutorial shows you how to make a visually stimulating Flash gallery that employs the parallax scrolling technique. Parallax scrolling is often found in 2D games and other animation. The technique creates an illusion of depth, as it makes background images scroll at a slower rate than those in the foreground.

The example used in the tutorial is of the interior of a living room. Every step needed to construct the living room, including its floor, wall, furniture, decorations, and more is discussed. Once that's finished, the tutorial gets into the animation and scrolling of the gallery. In the end, you have yourself an impressive scrolling gallery whose example you can use to implement on photography sites and the like. When you consider the overall effect, it's nice to know that it can be achieved without an excessive amount of work.

Are you on a beginner's level when it comes to Flash but anxious to get your feet wet in creating a simple game? If so, this tutorial might be the perfect one for you. You'll learn the steps necessary to create a basic Pong game that not only takes little work to accomplish, but is plenty of fun in its end result.

The tutorial is quite lengthy, but each step is explained in detail so that you can create your own Flash Pong game from scratch. It all begins with creating the 3D scene, and continues with creating the ball, rotation, start function, and paddles. Next is the creation of your opponent's AI, the ball functionality to move around and bounce off walls, collision bounce, etc. The final result is simple and won't be the most complex game you will find, but it's a good start that will introduce you to Flash and its game-creating possibilities.